“Over the last 50 years, there have been widespread temperature related reductions in snowpack in the West, with the larges reductions occurring in lower elevation mountains in the Northwest and California where snowfall occurs at temperatures close to the freezing point,” noted the report, which projected further snow runoff reductions in coming years.

Consequently, this rapid melt of the snowpack translates into spring runoff that can comprise a majority of the total annual flow, and be of very short-term duration – as little as only two to three weeks [13].